Without a Grave Page 11

  I tried again. ‘Who can I call?’

  The corner of his mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile. ‘You don’t call. You don’t want to get involved. If the police find out you’re the one who stumbled over the body, and it turns out that there was foul play . . .’ The smile vanished. ‘Best case, you’re tied up in the court system for years. Worst case, they’ll turn you into a suspect.’

  Don’t get involved. The same advice I’d received from Mimi, but still I said, ‘You’re kidding me.’

  Gator shrugged. ‘It’s happened.’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘You keep your mouth shut.’

  Hannah Ives keeping her mouth shut. If Paul had been there, he’d have been laughing hysterically.

  Perhaps it was the Anglophile in me, but I tended to trust organizations with the word ‘royal’ in their titles, organizations like ‘The Royal Bahamian Police Force.’ That said, I hadn’t exactly been dazzled by the notices I’d read about the outfit on the Abaco tourist blogs. Consider this: Police have few emergency vehicles, streets and houses are unmarked, so the best thing to do when you are a crime victim is go to the police station nearest you and provide transportation to the crime scene. CSI it wasn’t.

  ‘If I knew anything, I’d certainly tell you,’ Gator had concluded before powering off with Justice and some tourists for an all-day, two-tank dive on Fowl Cay.

  And I had to be satisfied with that.

  As if to compensate, it had been happy days on the Net. No email emergencies except the good kind – a baby granddaughter for the couple anchored behind Scotland Cay on Always Something – and lost-and-founds with happy endings.

  A boat cat answering to Marmalade had gone missing after an altercation with a local potcake, but had turned up the following day snacking happily on conch bits behind George’s conch salad stand next door to the Harbour View Marina on Bay Street. It’s a troubling thought, but more people were worried and out searching for that cat than cared about whoever it was who had burned to a crisp on the preserve.

  Happily, the wildfires were out.

  The weather continued happily, too. Sunny, highs in the eighties, chance of widely scattered thunderstorms.

  And, ugly as it was, every cruiser seemed to share a we’re-all-in-this-together camaraderie as we watched our stock portfolios go up and down like an Episcopalian in church.

  Like I said, it was Same-Old-Same-Old on the Net, until the morning Tony Sands called in on open mike.

  I was taking calls as usual.

  ‘Sea’s the Day, I hear you. Stand by. Anyone else?’

  ‘Reel Time’ I hear you, too. Stand by. Anyone else?’ When no one else spoke up, I continued. ‘Nothing heard. Go ahead Sea’s the Day.’

  Brian Jones on Sea’s the Day was a new arrival to the Abacos and needed to know where to get a haircut (Lanie’s Cuts and Curls in Memorial Plaza), and where to find an ATM that dispenses US dollars. (As if!) With Brian half satisfied, I moved on to Tony.

  ‘Reel Time, go ahead Tony.’

  We knew Tony fairly well. A charter fishing boat captain operating out of Man-O-War Cay, he’d taken Paul deep-sea fishing, but the only fish Paul ever landed was a thirty-pound barracuda. Not particularly edible, but it made a great picture. At least his colleagues back at the Academy were impressed.

  ‘I’m looking for the sailing vessel Wanderer,’ Tony broadcast, ‘a Reliant 41, green hull, three days overdue from Lake Worth, Florida. Wanderer is skippered by Frank Parker. His wife, Sally, is also aboard.’

  My head swam. We knew Frank and Sally Parker! I took a deep, steadying breath and tried to remember what, as Net anchor, I was supposed to say next. I tried to keep my voice neutral as I pressed the talk button and repeated Tony’s announcement in case anyone missed it. Meanwhile, I was gesturing frantically to Paul with my free hand. As I spoke, I watched Paul’s expression change from surprise to worry.

  ‘Anyone seen the vessel Wanderer, a Reliant 41, come now,’ I said. The airwaves were heavy with silence as I waited hopefully for someone to call in with a positive sighting. I hated having to say, ‘Nothing heard.’

  ‘Is there anybody in range of Green Turtle Cay who can relay for the Net?’ I asked.

  Knot Hers volunteered, and I listened again as the message about Wanderer was repeated, but again, the only response was a disappointing silence.

  I tried not to worry as I hurried through a recap of the weather, completely skipped the trivia question (trivial, under the circumstances) and wound up the Net.

  ‘If there’s nothing further . . .’ I took my thumb off the talk button and waited. ‘Then the Net is clear.’

  I slotted the mike into its cradle, leaned back in my chair and sighed. ‘Frank and Sally. Dear God, I hope they’re OK.’

  While I had been wrapping up the Net, Paul had powered up his laptop. Now he looked up from the screen. ‘I’ve got Frank’s cellphone number here somewhere.’ He tapped a few keys. ‘After Frank retired, he and Sally were supposed to be cruising the Intracoastal. Why is Tony looking for them, I wonder?’

  Paul crossed to the radio and picked up the mike, still hot and sweaty from where I’d been clutching it for almost an hour. ‘Reel Time, Reel Time, this is Windswept. Come back.’

  The airwaves crackled. ‘Reel Time here, Paul. Switch and answer seven three?’

  ‘Seven three.’

  ‘Tony, what’s up?’ Paul asked after the connection was made. ‘I know Frank Parker. He used to teach oceanography at the Naval Academy, went on to consult for the Smithsonian’s environmental research center south of Annapolis. What’s he doing in the Abacos?’

  ‘You know the meeting in Hope Town on Wednesday?’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Parker was going to testify on behalf of Save Hawksbill Cay.’

  ‘If the government didn’t believe Jean Michael Cousteau, what would make them believe Frank Parker?’

  ‘Parker has contacts at the University of Florida. They were refuting the claims of the environmental impact statement made by Mueller’s so-called experts. Parker’s not being paid – the scientists who wrote that report are on Mueller’s payroll – so he’s got no personal interest in the project.’

  ‘Do you know what Parker was going to say?’

  ‘That the project is an environmental catastrophe.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  ‘When did you hear from Parker last?’

  ‘Tuesday. He’d made the crossing and had put down his hook in Great Sale.’

  The crossing. I knew that meant Frank and Sally Parker had successfully crossed the Gulf Stream from Florida, a voyage not to be taken lightly if the weather isn’t favorable. While Paul talked, I consulted the map we had taped to the side of the refrigerator. With my finger, I followed the chain of islands west from Hawksbill Cay. I found Great Sale Cay easily, almost due north from Grand Bahama. From the air, it looked like an anchor.

  I knew you could sail from Great Sale to Allens-Pensacola in a day. From there to Green Turtle was another day, and if the weather was right – and it’d been nothing but fine, wind speed and direction-wise, for the past week – the trip from Green Turtle through the Whale Passage to Hawksbill couldn’t have taken more than a day. So, according to my calculations, for the whole trip I’d say three, four days, max.

  When I turned back to the radio, Paul was saying, ‘Maybe they’re just taking their time?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Tony replied. ‘Last time Parker telephoned, he said he’d see me on Thursday and pop a Kalik. It’s not like him not to call if he ran into any trouble or changed his plans.’

  ‘I have to agree. Not like him at all. At the Academy he was always the first to turn his grades in. Not like Sally, either. She’s a friend of my wife’s going way back.’

  That was the truth. Sally was the organizer’s organizer, the woman who was living proof of the saying, ‘If you want something done,
find the busiest person you know.’ It was Sally who engineered my post-surgery, post-chemo dinner brigade. Every day for six weeks, someone from the Naval Academy Women’s Club had showed up on my doorstep at five thirty sharp, holding a hot casserole in her oven-mitted hands.

  A thought occurred to me, and I scribbled it down on one of the Post-it notes that still littered the table. I slid it in front of Paul.

  Paul picked up my note and squinted at it. ‘Was their dog with them, too?’

  ‘Duffy? Yeah. I even asked Winnie to order a supply of special dog food for the little yapper.’

  Frank, Sally and their Scottish terrier, Duffy. Overdue. I refused to use the term ‘missing.’

  It was easy, I knew all too well, to lose track of time while in paradise. Frank wasn’t scheduled to speak until Wednesday. They were probably dawdling along, anchored in an idyllic lagoon, swimming, laughing, with Duffy barking at them playfully from the bow as they splashed in the water below him.

  We knew Wanderer, too, a Reliant 41 yawl built by Cheoy Lee. We’d often sailed with the Parkers on the Chesapeake before Frank’s retirement had taken them away. They had sailed, quite literally, into the sunset, following a lifelong dream. Postcards had come from Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, Hilton Head, Fernandina Beach, St Augustine and Cape Canaveral as they made their way south along the inland waterway.

  ‘I wish I had known they were coming,’ I complained to Paul when he’d finished his conversation with Tony and had cradled the mike. ‘We’ve got plenty of room on the dock. They could have tied up there. Slept in the snore box.’

  ‘We’ll tell them when we see them.’ Paul laid his hand on mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Don’t worry.’

  TEN

  MR THEODORE R. ZICKES . . . CAME HERE AND ORDERED A THIRTY-FOOT AUXILIARY SLOOP. UNCLE WILL COMPLETED THE BOAT . . . AND IT WAS NAMED SWEET-HEART. THE SWEET-HEART WAS LEFT HERE YEAR ROUND IN UNCLE WILL’S CARE. I WET THE DECKS EACH MORNING WHEN IT DID NOT RAIN AND THERE WAS NO DEW. FOR THIS JOB I RECEIVED TWO SHILLINGS (28 CENTS) PER MONTH. EACH YEAR THE SWEET-HEART WAS GIVEN A COMPLETE PAINT JOB BY SOME OF UNCLE WILL’S WORKMEN.

  Haziel L. Albury, Man-O-War

  My Island Home, p. 55

  I stuck my head into the bedroom where Paul had been hiding out all morning with his laptop, manipulating geometrical shapes with his Sketchpad software. A cube was spinning crazily around the screen.

  ‘The barge is just in, so I’m off to the grocery.’

  ‘Apples,’ he said without looking up. ‘And English muffins if they have them.’

  His fingers only paused; they were still glued to the keys.

  ‘Dreamer,’ I muttered. The last time the Pink Store had English muffins, they had been three weeks past their sell-by date, but I bought them anyway. A shout out for calcium propionate, sorbic acid and monoglycerides.

  I added ‘apples’ to my list and an optimistic ‘Eng muff,’ slipped the list into my pocket and my feet into my Crocs. As I emerged into the sunlight from the shade of the porch, I checked the sky. A malevolent black cloud had settled over Abaco. I wondered if I had time to get to the grocery and back before it reached Bonefish Cay and gave me and my purchases a good drenching.

  I made a quick detour to haul the clothes off the line, toss them into the laundry basket without folding and slide it on to the bunkhouse porch under the shelter of the roof. They would need ironing, but since we didn’t have an iron – such a pity! – what did it matter?

  Ten minutes later, I tied Pro Bono up at the government dock in Hawksbill Harbour and went ashore. The barge was still unloading cardboard crates of produce and dairy products at the Pink Store, so I walked on, stopping for a minute or two at Hawksbill Marina to enjoy the view. Fishing boats and luxury yachts that Paul and I could never afford in a million years were tied up to finger piers, gently rocking. I wondered if any of their owners would be moving to Mueller’s Tamarand Tree Marina when it opened in six months’ time, and what effect their desertion would have on the locals.

  Next door, at Tropical Treats, I placed an order for lunch – two conch burgers and fries to go. Service at Tropical Treats is glacial – you pay extra for that – so I knew I could dilly-dally around town for as long as an hour before my order would be ready. But the food was always worth the wait.

  At Pinder’s Boat Yard, I loitered outside the shed to observe while workers put the finishing touches on one of their custom-made launches. As I peered through the open doors, they lowered the helm into place on a twenty-five foot beauty and began fastening it to the deck. Nearby sat a fiberglass hull still in the mold; the next boat that would come off their modest, low-tech assembly line. I would have stayed longer, but I was starting to hallucinate on fiberglass resin fumes, so I decided to see what was going on in the yard outside.

  Behind the shed, two other workers had maneuvered a yacht on to a sled and were hauling it out of the water on a marine railroad. The sled was attached by a steel cable to an electric winch, which cranked the vessel along the rails, across the road and up a slight incline where another winch and pair of rails moved the boat sideways. The whole operation took less than ten minutes, and when it was done, the boat was tucked neatly into a slot between two other boats at least fifty feet up on dry land. Impressive. Back home, that task would have taken three guys, one supervisor and a hundred ton, half-million dollar Marine Travelift the size of a town house.

  Because it was hurricane season, the yard was full of yachts propped up on jack stands, packed together like proverbial canned sardines, awaiting the return of their owners in November when the threat of hurricanes would be over. Some were covered with shrink wrap, others with tarps. Still others were being cleaned, repaired and repainted, like the sailboat someone I recognized was working on now.

  ‘Bonjou, Daniel.’

  Daniel stood on the top rung of a ladder propped up on the side of the vessel’s hull. He was brushing varnish on the wooden toe rail with deft, fluid strokes. When I spoke, he balanced his paintbrush on the rim of the varnish can and looked down. ‘Bonjou!’

  ‘Bel bato, n’est-ce que pas!’

  Ah, I should own such a boat. A cobalt-blue hull, color so pure and deep I felt I could dive right into it. Woodwork varnished to a high gloss, glowing in the sun. Someone was very lucky.

  ‘Ki-moun posede sa bato?’ I asked Daniel.

  Daniel grinned. ‘Mister Jaime.’ With his paintbrush, Daniel gestured toward the stern of the vessel, which I took as an invitation to check it out for myself.

  At the stern I found another worker up on a ladder lettering A-L-I-C-E I-N W-O-N-D-E-R-L-A-N-D on the transom. That figured. The jerk probably thought that naming a boat after his wife would make up for the black eye.

  As I admired the boat, though, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Like luggage on airport baggage carousels, many boats look alike – their fiberglass bodies are laid out one after another in identical molds, after all – yet this one seemed familiar.

  I stepped back for a broader view. The Alice in Wonderland had two masts, the smaller of the two mounted in the stern, behind the helm. So it was a yawl. An unusual rig for a boat these days. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of yawls we’d seen in the Abacos since our arrival.

  Trying to act casual, I paced off the distance from bow to stern. Forty feet, more or less.

  My heart did a quick rat-a-tat-tat in my chest. Frank and Sally’s Wanderer was a forty-one foot yawl.

  I couldn’t count the number of times we’d sailed the Chesapeake Bay with the Parkers on Wanderer. I remembered one long day on the bay when Frank, trying to beat a squall, plowed Wanderer into a piling, gouging her bow. I walked around to the bow of Alice in Wonderland and reached up as high as I could, running my fingers along the rounded seam, feeling for any sign of damage. But if there’d been any, it had been repaired.

  Paul would tell me that I was letting my imagination run away with me.

  And yet as I stared at
the boat, at its distinctive keel, I flashed back to a Sunday afternoon at the Naval Academy marina where Paul and I had helped Frank and Sally roll anti-fouling paint on Wanderer’s hull. I’d painted around that propeller shaft myself, or one exactly like it.

  If I were to prove that this vessel was Frank and Sally’s boat, I’d have to get inside. But I couldn’t do that while Daniel and his co-workers were on the job.

  I thought about the problem as I walked to the grocery where I picked out the supplies I needed – alas for Paul, no English muffins – and set them down on the checkout counter. I visited with Winnie for a while, killing time until noon when I hoped the boat-yard workers would break for lunch.

  ‘How’s Lisa?’ I asked as I packed my purchases into the Trader Joe’s bag I’d brought with me. There’d been a benefit supper for the seven-year-old, Winnie’s granddaughter, at one of the local churches. Hand-printed signs announcing the event had been tacked up on every telephone pole in town.

  ‘She’s in good spirits,’ Winnie told me. ‘Ted took her to Nassau yesterday. They may have to do surgery.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I said, meaning it. I’d rather straddle a log and dog-paddle to a hospital in Florida than have surgery for anything more serious than a hangnail in Nassau. ‘Do you mind if I ask what kind of surgery?’

  ‘It’s a heart valve defect. Congenital.’

  Yikes, I thought. That’s one for the Mayo Clinic, not Princess Margaret in Nassau.

  We chatted until the clock over Winnie’s head read eleven fifty-five, then I picked up my groceries, wished her goodbye, good luck and God speed, and made my way back to the boatyard.

  As I had hoped, Daniel and his co-workers were at lunch, most of the men sitting on upturned buckets in the shade of a tree, playing cards, using the top of a cable spool as a table. Daniel sat with his back against an upturned dinghy, eating a sandwich and reading his Bible.

  I waved casually, nodded, smiled and walked on, but as soon as I was out of their sight, I ducked around the corner of a utility shed and into the boatyard.